My name is Alexandra Garza and I was a student of Ileana Jiménez’s at Elisabeth Irwin High School (LREI). Before I was a student and now friend of Ileana’s, I had only known her contagious laugh heard frequently throughout the hallways. As time passed, I saw her at school assemblies encouraging students to get involved in various panels, lectures, and discussions on race, class, and gender. For some time, I’d been interested in joining these discussions Ileana so passionately advocated. I took my curiosity into consideration when selecting courses for my junior year. I was definitely lured in by Ileana’s passion. I decided to jump into the conversation head first by signing up for Ileana’s literature course, Fierce and Fabulous: Feminist Women Writers, Artists, and Activists. Aside from the fantastic title, I had a feeling this class could change my entire life. Continue reading →

“My name is Lola Lorber, I’m a freshman, and my preferred gender pronouns are she, her, and hers.”

Lola Lorber

This is how we introduce ourselves on the first few days of classes at Oberlin College. To some it may sound weird, funny, or redundant; but at Oberlin, it is the norm.

I am proud to say I believe in sex positivity and freedom of speech. I’m a vegan, and I like to laugh. I’ve recently gotten into stand-up comedy because I like being able to say things into a microphone and make myself loud and heard. I am proud to make people laugh. I am proud to be an LREI alum (Little Red School House & Elisabeth Irwin High School).

The first elective course I ever took in high school was a memoir writing class my junior year. In this class, I discovered my voice, my identity, and my love for telling stories. In the fall of 2007, we were an intimate class of ten students consisting of a mix of juniors and seniors, and one teacher, Ileana Jiménez (also known as Feminist Teacher). We met almost every day in a hidden corner of the library–and it was here where our lives were shared and merged with each other’s. My peers would read aloud their pieces to the class revealing their true selves. With assigned readings from published memoirs and writing prompts given to us by Ileana, we were all immersed on a journey of our own words. I quickly became familiar with my humorous and sincere voice and I knew that I would continue to embrace it in my future. Continue reading →

After being at LREI for four years, speaking about diversity and feminism became second nature to me. The classes that I took–such as Fierce and Fabulous: Feminist Women Writers, Artists, and Activists; Queer Identities: LGBT Literature and Film; and Memoir Writing–paired with the student diversity conferences that I attended, as well as the series of speakers that we were lucky to have at my school, all made issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality prevalent in my mind. During my years at Little Red, one of my teachers, Ileana Jiménez, helped me find myself, develop my feminist identity, and be proud of who I am. I learned to do diversity work in my everyday life.

When I got accepted to Cornell University I was ecstatic. It was my first choice, and I was going to be the first in my family to go to college. I thought,“It’s a huge school, so I am sure that I can find people who share my views on diversity, since Cornell is pretty diverse.” Boy, was I wrong! During my first weeks there, I noticed how racially segregated my field of hospitality management was as well as the University as a whole. I was taken by surprise when I saw that two clubs that I was interested in were completely segregated. One was all white, and the other was made up of all students of color. Naturally, I joined both, not only because I was interested in both clubs but also because I wanted to get at the root of the problem. Continue reading →

This week I am launching an ongoing series of guest posts from former students reflecting on their experience of learning feminism(s) in high school. The inspiration for this series came from my students, who each day teach me that they too want to be a part of feminism as activists, artists, and academics.

When I founded this blog at the close of 2009, I wanted to begin a conversation with feminist educators in K-12 schools about the work they do in their classrooms as feminists. Within a month of starting the blog, I posted a letter that a student of mine had written to President Obama calling for implementing a feminist curriculum in our K-12 classrooms.

But even with that wonderful response, I still wondered: Am I making a difference in my students’ lives? Is learning feminism in high school making an impact? And if so, would the voices of my students inspire other educators to make change in their classroom and in their schools? Continue reading →

The following post is first in a series on teaching paired texts in high school classrooms. It can also be found at Equality 101.

Toni Morrison (photograph copyright by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders)

Every spring when I teach my high school junior elective on Toni Morrison, I start with the same anecdote about the time I was grading papers in a café after school, when I decided to take a break and started reading The New York Times. Flipping through the pages, I noticed an ad that listed Toni Morrison as the featured speaker that very night at the New York Historical Society. She was giving a lecture as part of a series of talks that complemented the powerful 2005 exhibit “Slavery in New York.” Upon reading the ad, I quickly paid my bill and jumped on a subway uptown to the NYHS.

However, once I reached the museum, the event had already been sold-out. Behind me, a generous woman offered to sell me her absent friend’s ticket and I was in.

This passion for Morrison gets the course started. Once I enter class on the first day, I know I am not alone with my love. The students who take this upper level course all read The Bluest Eye in tenth grade. When I ask them to reflect on their reasons for taking a single author course on Morrison, students consistently cite their admiration for The Bluest Eye as their primary reason for wanting to read more of her work.

The course is titled Toni Morrison’s Beloved: Memoir, Imagination, and the Narratives of Slavery. In class, I often use the metaphor that Beloved is the “sun” or central text of the course and other readings that we study throughout the trimester are surrounding “satellite” texts. All of these satellite or paired texts serve a purpose: to demonstrate Morrison’s merging of rich literary, oral, and musical traditions throughout the novel. These traditions are: 1) slave narratives; 2) spirituals; 3) and modernism.

I have found using slave narratives, spirituals, and the history of modernism helpful in framing Beloved. As we move along in the novel, students appreciate this framing, as it provides touchstones for interpretation and understanding. Perhaps you will find these satellite or paired texts useful as well. Continue reading →

In the wake of excitement after Obama’s inauguration, I asked students to write a letter to our new President asking him to examine the issue of gender and education with a critical eye on the ways in which feminism might be addressed in the curriculum. All of the letters, 11 total (8 by girls, 3 by boys), were fantastic. Here’s one from an African American female student that captures the urgency of teaching issues of gender and feminism in K-12 classrooms: Continue reading →

As a teacher always in search of new texts, You Tube has opened up a treasure trove of possibilities for my Queer Identities: LGBT Literature and Film course.

With my school’s requirement of homework blogs, has come the additional perk of assigning videos that allow my students to become acquainted with authors such as James Baldwin and Leslie Feinberg even before we begin reading their novels. In addition, students can also learn about gender via short educational films such as Transgender Basics by the Gender Identity Project.

“This is to Mother You” was an original single by Sinead O’Connor and was re-recorded by O’Connor, Mary J. Blige, and Martha B in the summer of 2009 especially for GEMS’s fundraising efforts to stop commercial sexual exploitation of children.

Seeing the photo of members of my feminism class–all of whom are high school juniors and seniors–holding signs in the video reading “I am a survivor” and “You will survive” emphasizes the message about where we as feminist educators can and need to do the work of awareness about sex trafficking: in our very own classrooms.

The video above as well as the film Very Young Girls can easily connect to middle/high school units and courses focusing on human rights, media literacy, gender and women’s studies, health, and the history and literature of slavery.

For those in need of a text, I suggest using GEMS founder and executive director Rachel Lloyd’s Op-Ed “Corporate Sponsored Pimping Plays Role in US Human Trafficking.” Lloyd’s excellent piece can be taught in everything from a literature or media class to a math, economics, or government course to classes on music and music production. Lloyd brilliantly analyzes how corporate dollars not only reward pimp culture but ultimately contribute to the blind acceptance of the degradation of women and girls both on our local streets and on our local screens. Lloyd states:

“It would be easy to point to hip-hop culture as the primary culprit of this tidal wave of acceptance towards pimps. Hip-hop clearly needs to take responsibility for its ongoing misogynistic images and lyrics, but rappers could not have achieved what has become a mass acceptance of pimp culture alone. The tipping point came in 2003, when 50 Cent released his platinum selling song P.I.M.P. Several months later, Reebok rewarded him with a 50 million dollar sneaker deal. A few years later, Vitamin Water did the same. Why wouldn’t they? ‘Fiddy’ proved unequivocally that no one was objecting to his blatant degradation of women and girls when P.I.M.P went platinum three times and reached the Top 10 in 18 countries.”

Too often we say that don’t have the resources to address contemporary issues within our discipline. Conducting a close reading of this passage alone with our students points to the multiple fields in which we teach: economics, history, literature, media, music, politics, women’s studies, and much more.

No matter how we address sex trafficking in our classrooms, the upshot is to teach our students to take action. Content alone is not enough.

The Council of Daughters, which is also a part of GEMS, sent a letter today to its members with President Obama’s proclamation of January 2010 as National Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month. They included five things we can do to stop human trafficking:

Welcome to my Feminist Teacher blog, a site of inquiry for those interested in equity and justice in today’s classrooms. I am Ileana Jiménez, a thirteen-year veteran of both single sex and progressive independent schools, and I am excited to engage in this conversation with you.

Too often, academic conversations about feminism, women’s studies, gender studies, queer or LGBT studies, as well as studies such as African American, Asian American, Latino/a, Middle Eastern, and Native American studies, focus largely on higher education classrooms and the professors and scholars who teach and conduct research in these fields, leaving out teachers in secondary, middle, and early childhood education who also teach and conduct research on these subjects.

The invisibility of teachers in discussions of feminist pedagogy removes us from being seen as significant contributors to a variety of academic fields, and equally as important, from being recognized as providing young people and children with curricular experiences that are rich and meaningful.

But we are out there for sure. We are doing the work of feminist scholarship and we are doing the work of feminist curriculum and even feminist activism with our students.

This blog intends to expand the circle of discussion to educators in the k-12 sector who consider their teaching practices to be feminist in design and implementation. My goal is to make us visible to each other and to the larger world of educators, as we move forward with our important work. For this reason, I hope it will be a place of community and conversation, both inspiring and invigorating.

In my mind, a feminist pedagogy is one in which issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, religion, age, ability, politics, and human rights—among others—inform a teacher’s philosophical vision that shapes not only content but also action, both that of the teacher as well as the students in the classroom and beyond.

Let this site also be a place of action: the action of the mind and of the heart for greater gender, racial, and economic justice.